Quick viewing(Text Mode)

1 Loneliness

1 Loneliness

9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 3

ላ 1 ሌ

Loneliness

Exiled, wandering, dumbfounded by riches, Estranged among strangers, dismayed by the infinite sky, An alien to myself until at last the caste of the last alienation. —, “Abraham”

IMMIGRANTS The Jewish encounter with America began with two dozen refugees setting foot in New Amsterdam, the city on the Hudson River soon to be renamed , in 1654. No red carpet greeted them. Governor Peter Stuyvesant wished these members of what he called “the deceitful race” and “blasphe- mers of the name of Christ” to leave. He was overruled by the directors at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam. The newcomers stayed and were soon joined by brethren who established communities in , Newport, Charleston, and Savannah. A hundred or so American fought in the Revolutionary War on behalf of a country unique in history, a country that from its very inception guaranteed the free exercise of religion. In the not-so-distant past, the Jews of Europe had lived at the whim of their hosts, who could—and did— revoke Jews’ residential rights at any time. Jews had been expelled from Vienna in 1670 and from Prague in 1744. They were commonly seen— and saw themselves—as temporary settlers, as tolerated strangers. Resigned to political powerlessness, they learned to dwell in Jewish tradition itself, poet Heinrich Heine said, as a “portable homeland.” George Washington, by contrast, assured the Jews of Newport that the U.S. government, dedi- cated to religious tolerance, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

3

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 4

Though accepted as full citizens, Jews remained obscure in influence and small in number. Fewer than three hundred Jews lived in New York on the eve of the Revolution. Only 3,000 or so resided in the young republic by 1820—mostly descendents of the Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century. Starting in the 1820s, however, after the “Hep! Hep!” riots terrorized the Jews of Central Europe, a wave of German- speaking Jewish immigrants fled from , Prussia, and Posen. Some of these “German” Jews—such as the founders of Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue—brought with them Reform . Discarding ritual requirements and ideas of ethnic distinctiveness, throwing off the yoke of the law, these immigrants preferred to see Judaism not as a body of revealed law but as a set of ethical teachings. This only eased their way into American society, and most acculturated fast. Some of the German Jews made it big: investment banker Marcus Goldman; retailer Benjamin Bloomingdale; Nathan Straus of Macy’s; Levi Strauss, who patented “riv- eted clothing” and clothed America’s westward pioneers in jeans; mining millionaire Meyer Guggenheim. By 1880, more than a quarter million Jews lived in the . But this, in retrospect, would come to be seen merely as the first and smaller wave of immigration. Between 1881, when the assassination of Czar Alexander II roiled , and 1924, when the U.S. National Origins Immigration (Johnson-Reed) Act stemmed the tide of immigrants, 2.5 mil- lion Jews from Eastern Europe—-speakers from the shtetls of Rus- sia, Galicia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania, the poorest and least educated of Europe’s Jews—landed on American shores. Driven away from the old country by pogroms, persecution, and poverty, and drawn by the promise of prosperity in the goldeneh medina (the Golden Land, in Yiddish), they gave the largest Jewish concentration of any city in his- tory. By 1910, they made up a quarter of the city’s dwellers. By 1915, 1.4 million Jews made their home in New York. And by the end of , more Jews lived in New York City than in Western Europe, South Amer- ica, and Palestine put together. Needless to say, some Americans were no more pleased by this inundation than Stuyvesant had been two and a half centuries before. In 1921, Albert Johnson, chair of the House Immigration Committee, quoted the head of the U.S. Consular Service as complaining that the recent Polish Jewish immi- grants were “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” Several years earlier, in The Education of Henry Adams (1918), the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams had remarked on the

4 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 5

threat the immigrants posed. “Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Jacob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans.” Along with the peddlers, tailors, bookbinders, shoemakers, and silver- smiths, the wave of Eastern European immigration carried ashore pious tra- ditionalists who brought into the New World a reverence for study— rabbinic luminaries who would put their indelible stamp on religious life in the new country. The Orthodox among them started day schools (such as Yeshivah Vadaath), (such as the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theo- logical Seminary), synagogues (such as the Eldridge Street synagogue), and newspapers (such as the Yiddishes Tageblatt). Hasidic rebbes recreated their communities in Boro Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights. Scholars such as Solomon Schechter and Louis Ginzberg imported their European erudition to the Jewish Theological Seminary, which opened its doors in 1887. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, immigrated in 1889. Bernard Revel, founder of College (later Yeshiva Univer- sity), arrived in 1906.1 Still more numerous were the Jewish radicals who took to trade unions and , men and women who pioneered the labor movement to relieve their bitter conditions in the sweatshops. Not all socialists in America were Jews, but Jews were disproportionately represented in the socialist ranks. After 1900, Jews predominated in socialist trade unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Cloth- ing Workers of America. Jews Adolph Strasser and led the Socialist Labor Party. The Socialist Party, which broke away from the SLP, was led by Jews such as Morris Hillquit (born Moishe Hillkowitz) and Victor Berger, the first socialist congressman.2 (The only other socialist congress- man, a two-term representative from the named Meyer Lon- don, elected in 1914, 1916, and 1920, was also a Jew.) More than a third of the Communist Party membership in New York—concentrated in the upper Bronx—was Jewish. By 1917, the Yiddish socialist Forward, edited by an ex- yeshiva student named —nicknamed Der Proletarisher Magid (the proletarian preacher)—enjoyed 150,000 subscribers. It was joined in 1922 by a smaller Yiddish Communist paper, Freiheit. Part of the consisted of intellectuals, many of whom would be driven even further to the Left by the Depression. Playwright and essay- ist later quipped that New York City of the 1930s used to be the most interesting part of the , and indeed into the New

LONELINESS 5

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 6

York of the Red Decade crowded a mixed multitude of crypto-Communists and Communist sympathizers, Stalinoids and Stalinophiles, Marxist maver- icks and socialist schlemiels and parlor pinks. Stalinists may have dominated the Left, but because Marxist politics acted in those days like a theology, there was plenty of heresy and schism to go around. Now-forgotten factions and splinters of factions proliferated like breakaway Hasidic sects: Shacht- manites and Shermanites, Cannonites and Lovestoneites, Fieldites and Fos- terites. The distinctions between them were usually apparent only to those on the inside, and a decade or two later few would remember the questions over which these factions had so bitterly divided. Finally, starting in the mid- 1930s, these groups were joined by the Weimar émigré intellectuals, includ- ing , , Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Hans Morgenthau—Hitler’s gift to America.

YOUNG TROTS Those who would midwife Commentary magazine into the world resembled nothing so much as a loosely knit, self-formed Family (as future paterfamilias would call it), bound by a common language and frame of reference, a shared ordering of values, and an intense crisscrossing alertness to one another’s judgments. These were kinsmen of a common cause, a com- mon past, and a common set of ancestors. They practiced their hypercritical intellectual gamesmanship—a form of close infighting—en famille. The Family for the most part emerged from the dissident, fiercely anti- Stalinist Trotskyists, a tiny minority even on the Left. Many had belonged to the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), City College division. They had looked to Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) as the “good” revolutionary: a founder of the Soviet state, theoretician of the Rus- sian Revolution, leader of the Red Army, archinternationalist creator of the Fourth International (antagonist of ’s Third International, or Comintern), brilliant polemicist and writer of manifestos, a man intoxicated with politics who took literature with high seriousness. His example encour- aged the Young Trots to feel like a small but potent ideological vanguard. (In 1917, after all, when Trotsky lived in New York for several months, there were only 40,000 Communists in a Russia of 70 million, and look what they wrought.) Like Trotsky, his American acolytes—revolutionaries duped by the revolution—loathed Stalin’s dictatorial tendencies. Refusing to rationalize away Stalin’s crimes as somehow necessary to the revolution, they insisted that Stalin had betrayed the revolution. Following Trotsky’s example, too, the

6 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 7

Family theory-spinners learned to think hard about politics from an interna- tionalist perspective—with great independence of mind and ideological fer- vor. They pored over the Trotskyist journal the New International and Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1924); they talked incessantly about what had gone awry with . Haunters of public libraries who got an education via the little magazines, seekers after coherence and comprehen- siveness, they took positions. They staged debates—rhetorical jousts, really— at Irving Plaza off Union Square. For formal education there was the (CCNY). Many Family members—“sturdy sons of City College,” as the school’s alma mater song wishfully hailed its graduates—thought of the neo-Gothic perch overlooking Harlem as the Harvard of the proletariat. William Phillips (class of 1928), later an editor of and a contributor to Com- mentary, called City College “the poor boy’s steppingstone to the world.”3 Being both free of quotas and free of tuition, City College was in the late 1920s and 1930s at least three-quarters filled with Jewish boys (the girls were at , on East 68th Street). Members of the Family’s City College branch picked up a high combat- ive style from an acerbic Minsk-born philosophy professor named Morris Raphael Cohen (class of 1900), who taught at CCNY from 1912 to 1938— the first Jew to join the philosophy faculty there. Cohen’s witty Socratic style made him a popular teacher. According to the 1935 yearbook, “Dr. Over- street may be chairman of the department, but to the cognoscenti there is but one God . . . and his prophet is Morris Raphael Cohen.”4 After class, and under its influence, Cohen’s Trotskyist students spent brown-bagged lunchtimes in their alcove in the cafeteria of Shepard Hall debating the finer points of Charlie Marx’s thought: Was the Soviet Union a degenerated worker’s state? When would the class structure wither and a genuine prole- tariat emerge? If these preoccupations now seem arcane, a more consequential ques- tion closed the Red Decade. Although most wholeheartedly supported American entry into World War II, the Young Trots opposed America’s involvement, not because they were isolationists, but because they could not help seeing World War II as a war to extend capitalist domina- tion. They wanted no part in a war between rival imperialisms.5 They could not bring themselves to support a capitalist regime, even against Hitler. Nazism seemed to them just capitalism in extremis— as the last, des- perate convulsion of capitalism. “That the Nazis wanted to murder every Jew they could get their hands on was the last thing about Nazism that

LONELINESS 7

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 8

interested us,” said Milton Himmelfarb (CCNY 1938), later a Commentary contributing editor. “For us the big question, the question that called forth all our dialectical virtuosity, was, Is Nazism the final stage of capitalism?”

MARXMANSHIP Politics was the Family’s alpha and omega, a master light of all its seeing. , who would head the novelist branch of the Family, used to say he first heard of V. I. Lenin and Trotsky “in the high chair while eating my mashed potatoes.” (CCNY 1939), destined for prominence as a sociologist at Columbia and Harvard, had joined YPSL at the precocious age of thirteen. At fourteen, future literary critic (CCNY 1940) had joined a YPSL circle in the East Bronx. In such company it was nearly impossible to remain a noncombatant. To be liberal was considered wishy-washy; to be Republican, unthinkable. “If there were any Republicans at City,” (CCNY class of 1940 and later a Commentary editor) said, “and there must have been some, I never met them, or even heard of their existence.” Outside the Family, there was, in the 1930s, a smattering of Jewish anti-Communists, including Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine. But if in the Family politics was every- thing, Marxist socialism was politics, a style of perception entire unto itself. offered a comprehensive theory of history, a coherent view of human experience, an ebullient and tantalizing purity of purpose. The Family’s radicalism was, as they used to say, overdetermined; it drew from several sources, each of which would have been sufficient alone. As if it weren’t enough that they were Jews and intellectuals, they were also prodigal sons of working-class immigrant families, intimates of poverty and prejudice. These young men, whom we shall meet later as adults, had grown up in tough neighborhoods in and . (City College 1923), a son of a garment worker, had grown up in a Williamsburg tenement slum. ’s father was a tailor, and his father-in-law, an immigrant from Poland, made straw braid. Irving Howe’s father peddled linens door to door, and ’s worked as a necktie wholesaler. Irving Kristol’s father, who worked in the clothing busi- ness, suffered several bankruptcies. “We were poor,” Kristol said, “but then everyone was poor, more or less.” (CCNY 1944), the youngest of seven kids, was born in East Harlem and raised in the East Bronx, where his father spent his days bent over a sewing machine. When the young Glazer later got an editorial job at Commentary, wielding his

8 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 9

blue pencil over manuscripts, his proud if uncomprehending mother could only tell her friends, “My Nathan is in the pen line.” In the 1930s, dreams of a classless society answered Depression anxieties and immigrant disorientations both. The Zionists and the Orthodox sepa- ratists had their answers; the Jewish socialists had another, which involved an escape from the barbarisms of capitalism and an entry into the wider family of humanity. As far as the Family was concerned, capitalism was not just unviable and unjust; it was also through. The Family felt especially drawn to socialism’s moral concern. Its dramatic doctrine—its collective hope for humankind—offered rootless radicals the exhilaration of replacing Jewish parochialism with universalism, the relief of transposing loyalty from nation to class. Trying to dissolve the indissoluble, they looked to socialist universalism as a means to transcend religious distinctions and to escape Jewish difference into a higher allegiance, in which the relevant distinction was no longer between Jew and goy, but between worker and capitalist. This universalism would allow them, command them even, to overcome their origins, to become men of broad sympathies, to make them, to use Shelley’s line, “equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless”—citizens of the world. Before World War II, then, Marxism, with its calls for social justice, acted upon the Family like a substitute faith, enthroning Man in God’s place. Its dogma of progress through class struggle offered a secularized account of collective redemption. “We’d read Kapital the same way we read Humash [Pentateuch],” Daniel Bell remembered. “Line by line.” Irving Howe said that Karl Marx’s formulas were taught with “talmudic rote.” As a boy, Clement Greenberg (who would serve as Commentary managing edi- tor) believed Judaism and socialism were synonyms. The sacred canon of Marx and Friedrich Engels offered another eschatology, one that assigned the working class—the Family included—a progressive, even messianic role in history and guaranteed the triumph of that class. Family members could believe they were the persecuted, the chosen by History. (“What’s a Com- munist?” asks a character in a Harold Brodkey story. “A man trying to act like a Jew without getting mixed up with God.”) Marxism seemed to bear the same structure as Jewish belief—a yearning for harmony regained.

THE YEARNING would go unfulfilled. Some in the family had broken with the Communist Party before World War II, recoiling in revulsion from the Moscow trials of 1936–1937 and from the Stalinist purges and show trials that covered the Soviet Union with a “darkness at noon” (the title of ’s influential 1940 anti-Communist novel). They reacted with

LONELINESS 9

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 10

horror to the Hitler-Stalin pact in the summer of 1939 (between the man with a little mustache and the man with a big mustache, as Yiddish writer Chaim Grade used to say), and to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molo- tov’s announcement during a visit to the next year that fascism was a matter of taste. The execution in late 1942 of the leaders of the Jewish Bund in Poland by Stalin’s secret police caused Family members great distress. For others, the “disintoxication” took slightly longer. The Stalinization of East- ern Europe, the suppression of writers, the dissidents sent to the KGB’s Lubyanka prison, the millions sent to rot in the gulag’s forced labor camps as “enemies of ,” the brutality, the fear, the poverty—all these made it rather harder to look to the Soviet Union as a shining emblem of progress. By the end of the war, the Family’s anti-Stalinist socialists had become hard anti-Communists. (“There’s not a man in this room who’s hard enough for me!” Diana Trilling—Lionel’s wife and an unforgiving literary critic in her own right—declared of the political convictions of her fellow guests at an after-dinner party.) Their hatred for remained, now amplified by a newfound appreciation of America as a bulwark against the totalitarian horrors still freshly imprinted in memory. Their radicalism was behind them, but the experience of it remained. Daniel Bell remarked that radicals of the 1930s bore, “as on invisible frontlets, the stamp of those years on their foreheads.” “Joining a radical movement when one is young,” his friend Irving Kristol added, “is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.” Radicalism—and the way they wrested themselves from its grip—had left a deep mark as much on the way they thought about their place in America as on their thinking about America’s place in the world. Certain youthful notions now seemed utterly refuted. Commentary would come to life in 1945 amid widespread predictions that mass unem- ployment would resume as soon as war production ebbed. But it wouldn’t take long after the war to see that the dire prophecies had failed. It became clear that Western democracy was far from finished; American power seemed limitless. Capitalism had not only weathered the Depression; it also had ushered in a postwar economic boom, granting Americans higher stan- dards of living than ever. (The country’s gross national product quadrupled in the fifteen years after the war.) Anxiety dissolved into buoyant confi- dence. Depression discontent and wartime belt-tightening relaxed into postwar prosperity. White-collar suburbia spread into what economist

10 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 11

John Kenneth Galbraith would call “the affluent society.” In the face of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms, American socialism had lost momentum even before the war. (Socialist leader received 885,000 votes in his 1932 run for the presidency, but only 187,500 in 1936.) After the war, however, socialism finally shattered against the reef of the postwar boom. The unprecedented wave of prosper- ity swept from the Family’s mind any lingering dreams of radical reform. Its members could no longer, as during the 1930s, regard the country as economically oppressive. They could not help but notice that the working class had remained indifferent to socialism; that Marx, worshipper of His- tory itself, had turned out to be another false prophet; that Marxism had been revealed to be a great fantasy. The old Marxist talk of “the exploited masses” or “the decay of capitalism” now left them cold; the very word “rev- olution” rang hollow in their ears. What Trotsky had called “the death agony of capitalism” appeared in postwar light as the pangs of rebirth. In short, Hitler and Stalin had made it abundantly clear to the Family that would soon form around Commentary that there were more immediate threats than middle-class philistinism and capitalist exploitation. Flirta- tions with radicalism had ended; the Communist god had failed. The Great Experiment of socialism had turned into a mockery of its own prom- ises of a society in which man would no longer exploit man. Having lost their pink tint, Family members left the precincts of radical politics and alienation for what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called—in his classic liberal anti-Communist book of that name—the vital center.6 They now saw the disingenuous 1930s, as W. H. Auden had, as a “low dishonest decade.” Their political childhood had come to an abrupt end. “God died in the nineteenth century,” Irving Howe said, “utopia in the twentieth.”

PRESIDING GENIUS Though an ex-radical and son of immigrants, the man fated to create Com- mentary did not share the City College pedigree. Elliot E. Cohen was raised in the first years of the century in Mobile, Alabama. His father, a dry-goods shopkeeper, back in the old country had studied at the fabled yeshiva in Volozhin (in today’s ). The oldest child was named after George Eliot, author of Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel that gave a sympathetic and astonishingly early treatment of Jewish national rebirth in Palestine.7 “There was only one thing important in my family,” Elliot Cohen said. “Books.” Cohen could read newspaper headlines by age three. He was admitted to

LONELINESS 11

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 12

Yale at fourteen. The youngest member of the class of 1917, he won the John Addison Porter Prize, one the university’s highest, awarded for excel- lent written work of general scholarship.8 Beginning in his Yale days, Elliot Cohen nursed an ambition to change the world by founding his own magazine. “Why else start a magazine?” he said. He dreamed of editing an American Jewish entry into the great tradi- tion of American magazines of the previous century—the Dial, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, or the Democratic Review, con- jured into being by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. Cohen aspired to create not a general-interest magazine like Harper’s or the Atlantic, but something more akin to those venerable Ameri- can magazines of opinion, The Nation and , which in an era before television news had a point of view, offered a forum for serious arguments about politics and culture. Among illustrious Jewish journals, Cohen envied the cultural influence of Ahad Haam’s Hashiloach, founded in 1896, which brought forth the revival of Hebrew literature from Odessa, and Martin Buber’s Der Jude, launched in Berlin during World War I, which printed the leading lights of German-speaking Jewry.9 But of all these luminous models, it was the Menorah Journal in New York that shone for Cohen most brightly. Edited by Henry Hurwitz—a for- mer student at Harvard of philosophers and George San- tayana—the Menorah Journal had been breathed into life in 1915 by the founders of the Menorah Society, a circle at Harvard dedicated to promot- ing a Jewish humanism. Among the society’s founders were Horace Kallen (the son of an immigrant rabbi and later a philosopher at the New School for Social Research), Harry Wolfson (associate editor of the Menorah Journal and later first chair of the Jewish Studies Department at Harvard), and Hur- witz. In its heyday in the late 1920s, when it hosted the finest American Jewish writing in the country, the Menorah Journal owed its vitality to its precocious managing editor, one Elliot Cohen, former president of the Yale branch of the society, who had joined the editorial staff in 1924. Under Cohen’s watch, the Menorah Journal ran essays by Jewish historians Salo Baron and Simon Dubnow; polemics by Mordecai Kaplan (another City College alum, who first called for a “reconstruction” of Judaism, his lifelong theme, in its pages); stories by acclaimed Odessa-born writer Isaac Babel and by Tess Slesinger, a satirist of the New York intellectual Left; and poems by Brooklyn-born Jewish poet Charles Reznikoff.10 At the Menorah Journal Cohen mastered a kind of literary ventrilo- quism, a talent for employing others’ words rather than speaking in his own.

12 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 13

In his column for the magazine, “Notes for a Modern History of the Jews,” Cohen juxtaposed quotations to satiric effect without adding a word of his own. Take, for example, this piece of irreverence on the subject of Jewish response to anti-Semitism from 1924: “‘We Jews are happy in America and contented with conditions. We don’t care for [Henry] Ford and Klu Kluxes. We don’t notice them.’—Louis Marshall. ‘Louis Marshall devoted a large part of his annual report as president of the American Jewish Committee [AJC] to a spirited attack on the Klu Klux Klan.’—The American Israelite.” Already in the 1920s Cohen had grown exasperated with the sterility of organized Jewish life. Religious and lay leaders alike seemed to him shallow and pompous, their currency devalued by what he considered “spurious intellectual coin.” He dismissed purveyors of , which seemed to him “foreign to modern American conditions.” Nor could the managing editor summon much respect for what then passed for a Jewish press, mostly consisting of local papers such as Philadelphia’s Jewish Expo- nent (founded in 1887). “By a logic of which only editors of Jewish weeklies are capable,” he wrote in the Menorah Journal, “they advance Judaism and promote Jewish-Gentile understanding by printing accounts of how Jacob Dupkin, who once owned only one cart of junk, now owns practically all the junk there is.”11 American Jewish leaders between the world wars—the heads of national bodies such as B’nai B’rith (founded in 1843), the Ameri- can Jewish Committee (1905), Hadassah (1912), the Anti-Defamation League (1913), and the American Jewish Congress (1928)—appeared to Cohen’s eyes parochial, indifferent to ideas, too tolerant of hackneyed catch- phrases and third-rate cultural products. He complained in the October 1925 Menorah Journal that he lived in “an age that substitutes rhetoric for knowledge, bold assertions for learning, vainglorious pretensions for soundly-based convictions, bluster for strength, and braggadocio for an inwardly felt security.” With no small touch of frustration, he condemned the species of mediocrity that “is so busy hunting out heretics who will not bend the knee to the phrase ‘Jewish content’ that it has little energy for giv- ing ‘Jewish content’ any content.”

For the amazing fact is that Jewish books in English are incredibly few. It is unbelievable, for instance, until one tests it himself, how pitifully small the number of volumes the entire Reform movement in America has to its credit. This is the group in American Jewry which not only has been the most powerful and, on their own admission, the most cultured, but has had English the longest. Other groups, of course, contributed even less. . . .

LONELINESS 13

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 14

The fact is there are not available the smallest fraction of texts of Jewish his- tory, religion, philosophy and culture we shall need in our program to sub- stitute specific knowledge of the actual concrete sources of the Jewish spirit for the hollow nonsense of theological and political abstractions. Scholar- ship will have to be encouraged. . . . Professorships will have to be endowed at the leading American universities. . . . Periodicals devoted to the advancement of Jewish learning and encouragement of Jewish criticism, art, and literature will have to be supported.

Though Elliot Cohen forecast that Jews’ political and economic status in America was assured, the young managing editor feared that their intel- lectual self-respect was not. “Judaism cannot survive if intelligent Jews come to despise it,” he said in that same piece. Down with defensiveness, then. “American Jewry must be made to see that a life of apology is a shameful apology for a life.” To address the problem, Cohen called for a “thoroughgoing recon- struction of Jewish intellectual values,” and resolving to rescue the intellec- tual dignity of Judaism, he honed a talent for discovering young Jewish writers who might help him undertake the task. Felix Morrow, for instance (who would later lead a faction of the Socialist Workers Party and edit its paper, the Militant), came by the Menorah Journal offices near Union Square Park one day to take Cohen’s secretary to lunch. He got more than he bargained for. “When [Cohen] fixed his eye on me, I insisted I had no interest in a Jewish magazine or in Jewish life. All right, then, would I review books by (Jewish) authors on non-Jewish subjects? What about writing the story of Brownsville, where I grew up? . . . I wrote all these and more, while still protesting my lack of interest . . . then woke up one day to realize that I owed to Elliot Cohen my professional training as writer and editor.” Another of the writers Cohen lured in this way into an investigation of his Jewishness was a mannered, fastidious Columbia undergrad from Queens named Lionel Trilling, direct descendent of a pious rabbi in Bia- lystok, Poland. “It seems to me,” Trilling wrote in 1929,

that the whole purpose of practical Jewish endeavor is to create a commu- nity that can read the Menorah Journal. More exactly, of course, what I mean is that this purpose is to construct a society that can consider its own life from a calm, intelligent, dignified point of view; take delight in its own arts, its own thoughts, the vagaries of its own being. . . . The Jew is written

14 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 15

about carefully, fearlessly, without easy ‘sympathy’ nowhere save in the Journal, nowhere else as a human being and not as a problem.

Before Trilling came across the Menorah Journal, he said, “I had never seen a modern Jewish publication that was not shoddy and disgusting. Here I found no touch of clumsiness or vulgarity. . . . This was perhaps the first pub- lic Jewish manifestation of which I could say that.” Under Cohen’s guidance, Trilling, who had thought of himself as a Marxist for a very short time, pub- lished his first story in the Menorah Journal in 1925, when he was twenty. (It earned him $35.) Its publication, Trilling recalled four years later, marked an important turn in his life: “With the publication of my story I was caught. I could not escape thinking about Jews. I was not obsessed with Jewishness. I did not get religion. . . . But I accepted the fact of Jewishness as an important thing. I accepted it as part of my individuality and it functioned like a per- sonal characteristic—I could talk of it as ‘mine’ as one talks of a person’s hon- esty, weakness, strength, selfishness. I wasn’t very sure what it was, but it helped direct my life.” To Trilling, only six years younger, Cohen cut a Socratic figure, a man of immense personal force, the greatest teacher he had ever known: “He conversed endlessly, his talk being a sort of enormously enlightening gossip—about persons, books, baseball players and football plays, manners, morals, comedians.” Apparently, nothing was trivial in Cohen’s mind. Before long, Trilling was affectionately signing his letters to Cohen “Li.” Cohen set about instilling in his protégé an abiding belief in the communi- cability of complex ideas in clear language. Between 1925 and 1931, Trilling would write two dozen pieces for the journal: book reviews, essays, and four short stories. Decades later, as a professor of English at Columbia, Trilling acknowledged the debt his own urbane prose owed to Cohen. “No man in our country in our time had a greater respect for the virtues of English prose,” disciple said of mentor. “He was a man of genius.” Over time, Cohen, still managing editor, came to feel that under Henry Hurwitz the Menorah Journal’s proud irreverence had eroded. His boss dis- agreed. “I am afraid you and I have been growing apart in our conceptions of what the Journal should be,” Hurwitz wrote to Cohen in 1931. In the last line of his resignation letter, Cohen tendered a prediction: “The Journal will settle down to be the tabby-cat on the hearthstone of the official Jewish community, and purr for a living.” The journal came out as a bimonthly, then as a quarterly, until even the purring quieted after Hurwitz’s death three decades later.

LONELINESS 15

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 16

Cohen was at that time something of a Communist fellow traveler, and so after he left the Menorah Journal, it came as no surprise to his colleagues that he found work as executive secretary of a Communist-front organiza- tion called the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and served as a board member of the Communist League of America. After he, like many others in the Family, broke with the party in the 1930s, Cohen spent a mind-numbing decade as public relations director of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.12 Sensing that his talents were wasted and his aspirations dormant, every minute of it was a nightmare for him. He began to suffer from manic depression—lifting him high in winter, casting him low in the summer. Time’s unkind pen furrowed his face, melancholy tugged at his eyes, and the hair fringing his large head silvered over with gray.

AND THEN, AS THOUGH from nowhere, an offer, and elations of a dream fulfilled. In 1945, on the basis of the reputation he had amassed at the Menorah Journal, the venerable American Jewish Committee—the president of which he had earlier ridiculed in his column—invited Elliot Cohen, age forty-six, to edit its new monthly, Commentary. In 1906, after the Kishinev pogroms of 1903–1905 in czarist Russia, New York’s patrician, uptown German Jews—grand dukes such as Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Mayer Sulzberger, Cyrus Adler, Oscar Straus, and Louis Marshall—had founded the AJC “to prevent the infraction of the civil and religious rights of Jews, in any part of the world.” (Some of the same men, not incidentally, had funded the Menorah Journal.) Among its other initiatives, before World War I the AJC had opposed immigration restric- tions and lobbied against literacy tests for immigrants to America. During that war, it had organized relief for Jewish victims. And it had since 1938 put out a bimonthly digest, the Contemporary Jewish Record. A soft-spoken Spinoza expert named Adolph Oko, who had served as associate editor under Elliot Cohen at the Menorah Journal, became editor in 1944.13 “Polemics have been discouraged,” the editors of the Record declared. Although the editors gave occasional space to writers who would later contribute to Commentary—Hannah Arendt on stateless people, philosopher Sidney Hook on “Hitlerism,” and on British anti-Semitism—they took it as their main mission to publish documents of historical significance: the Nuremberg

16 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 17

decrees, the White Paper on Palestine, letters from Chaim Weizmann to the High Commissioner on Palestine, appeals of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.14 The most startling thing ever to appear in the Record came in 1944, near the end of its life. “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” revealed the depth of the reservations young Jewish intellectuals harbored about their own heritage. “I have never seen much of what I admire in American Jewish culture, or among Jewish writers in America generally,” literary critic (City College 1935) said in his contribution to the symposium. “As the Jew- ish community now exists,” Lionel Trilling somewhat harshly remarked, “it can give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew. . . . I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimeter to his stature by ‘realizing his Jewishness,’ although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness.” Clement Greenberg, soon to become Commentary’s managing editor, used the occasion to assail the smug and dreary middle-class attitudes of Ameri- can Jews: “No people on earth are more correct, more staid, more provin- cial, more commonplace, more inexperienced.” “Jews are, everywhere, a minority group,” Chicago-born writer and future Commentary contributor Isaac Rosenfeld ventured, “and it is a particular misfortune these days to be a minority group in the United States.” After Oko died in 1944, the Contemporary Jewish Record limped on for four issues with about 4,200 subscribers, but had clearly lost any gusto it once enjoyed. To replace it, the AJC dukes envisioned a less stuffy mag- azine of higher ambitions and wider influence; they cited “the need for a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs and contem- porary issues,” a publication that would explore the creative possibilities of Jewish culture in America. Even before the magazine had a name, the heads of the AJC announced its mandate: “Free from partisanship and hospitable to divergent views, the new monthly will aim to provide the reader with informed discussion on the basic issues of our time especially as they bear on the position and future of Jews in our country and in the world scene. It will also aid in the struggle against bigotry.” The magazine would address itself not just to Jews, but also to the American public at large. With the unanimous support of senior staff, John Slawson, the AJC’s executive vice president, chose Elliot Cohen as the man for the job.15

LONELINESS 17

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 18

IN THE ANTICIPATORY RUSH before the first issue of Commentary was due out, Cohen felt his black mood lifting; his considerable gifts would once more be harnessed. A hopefulness surged through him. “It is our hope that the new magazine will be a meeting ground for our finest minds and tal- ents,” he said. “We pride ourselves on Jewish creativeness in so many fields in the modern world. We need that creativeness of thought and expression in Jewish life, too. We shall have it, we sincerely believe, if we can offer it hospitality and freedom. To do this is a primary aim of this magazine, as it is of its publishers, the AJC.” It was here that Cohen’s Commentary would depart from the highbrow import racket at Partisan Review (to take the clos- est competition), a journal, founded in 1934, that joined and Marxism. Though the two little magazines shared many writers, Commen- tary would be less avant-garde than Partisan Review; less enamored of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein; less European in orien- tation; and, not least, more open about its own Jewishness. Partisan Review in its heyday ran almost nothing on Jewish issues. “The main difference between Partisan Review and Commentary,” Cohen said, “is that we admit to being a Jewish magazine and they don’t.” Cohen had been waiting all his life for this chance—the culmination of his deepest aspirations—and he resolved to seize it with great energy. The role of the presiding genius—a demanding, intimidating, sometimes overbearing parental figure—came naturally to him. Vis-à-vis his readers, Cohen practiced editing as pedagogy. “We think of ourselves as trying to be the best possible teacher talking to the best possible student,” he said. “Education is slow, but what is faster?” Vis-à-vis his stable of writers at the new magazine, Cohen imagined himself looking on from the edge of a baseball field. “I think an editor belongs back in the shadow of the dugout,” he said. “He’s a talent scout. He finds new writers. He’s a coach who has the sense to leave ’em alone when they’re good and tell ’em what’s wrong when they’re bad.” In practice, though, Cohen seldom left contribu- tors alone. He edited his authors exactingly, sometimes intrusively, even if they happened to be Thomas Mann or . (After Bernard Mala- mud submitted a short story to Commentary, young literary critic Irving Howe wrote to him, “The thought of Cohen’s heavy hand on your fantasy gives me the chills.”) As a writer, Cohen, whose thoughts tended to fold in on themselves like origami, was badly blocked. “For all his wit, knowledge of literature, and skill as an editor amounting to genius,” his friend Louis Berg said, “composition was agony for him. His thesis might be, and usually was,

18 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 19

bold, original, and sound, but it became in the writing so overloaded with parenthetical thoughts and superfluous argument as to vitiate its force.” To illustrate the point, Berg, a newspaperman, recalled the time he had against his better judgment allowed himself to be cajoled into coauthoring an arti- cle with Cohen. The subject was May Day. He sent Cohen a first draft. Weeks passed before he was finally called in. “His study floor,” Berg said, “was lined with neat piles of paper marked Version A, Version B, and so on, literally through the alphabet, and all bearing the mark of paste and shears. It was frightening.” Rather than write, Cohen preferred to make surrogates of his writers. He would take a writer to Major’s Cabin Grill across the street from the Commentary offices on West 33rd Street, its entrance guarded by a solid ebony statue of Buddha, and methodically lay out what he wanted. More often than not, by the time the bill came, the writer would feel that the piece was mostly written; all that was left to do was a bit of transcription work. “Working with Cohen,” Lionel Trilling admitted, “put the author in danger of fulfilling Cohen’s intentions, instead of the author’s.” Alfred Kazin, who started to write for Cohen in 1945, vented a similar frustration in his journal: “He hides his insecurities badly—simply can’t let any piece alone after he has bought it. ‘I wouldn’t be the editor I am,’ he confided in a fatherly tone, ‘if I didn’t show you how to make your piece even better than it already is.’” Kazin managed to hold him off, but other writers became exasperated. “Listen,” said, “Elliot, if you want to write, write under your own name!”

YOUNG MEN FROM THE BOROUGHS Fortunately for the magazine’s writers, Cohen, though a dominating pres- ence, did not labor alone at Commentary’s gaunt office loft with a grime- tinted skylight on the top floor of a building across from the Empire State Building. He inherited Clement Greenberg, managing editor of the AJC’s Contemporary Jewish Record, an assertive, bald-domed, extremely intelligent man who would become dean of American art critics, champion of Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists, great foe of middlebrow tastes. Before joining Cohen’s staff, Greenberg had served as clerk at the Customs Service on Varick Street—Department of Wines and Liquors—then as an editor at Partisan Review. At Cohen’s magazine, Greenberg declined to work terribly hard. He wrote more for Partisan Review than for Commentary.He treated the Commentary job as something of a sinecure, preferring to prepare

LONELINESS 19

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 20

his book on Catalan painter Joan Miró, or to pass the afternoon with his friend Delmore Schwartz (who published eleven of his poems in Commen- tary) in one of the wooden booths under the pressed-tin ceiling at the San Remo Bar in Greenwich Village. Not that this prevented Greenberg from putting on imperious airs, especially with his boss, with whom he often clashed. During their fights, Cohen would appeal to his secretary for backup. “Clem is the rudest man in New York, wouldn’t you say?” Greenberg did little to dispel the charge. One day, for instance, he accosted a Commentary summer intern named Alison Lurie, a twenty-year- old Radcliffe girl (who almost four decades later would win a Pulitzer). “I hope you don’t turn into one of those clever bitchy woman writers I know so many of,” he said. Clem’s younger brother, Martin—similarly lacking in social graces—joined him on staff in 1953. (When someone asked Saul Bel- low what he thought of the Greenberg brothers, the image of Confederate outlaws came to mind. “You mean Frank and Jesse?” Bellow said.) For managing editor, Cohen chose , a slim, pale, twenty-eight-year-old with steel-rim glasses. Warshow, the son of Russian immigrants, an atheist, had worked for three years for his father as a paper salesman, served as a code breaker in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war, and broke into journalism at , a weekly newspaper of the anti-Communist Left.16 Warshow’s mind recoiled from sentimen- tality, and the force of that recoil propelled his brilliant, pioneering essays on popular culture—from Westerns and gangster movies to comic strips. Warshow prided himself on his restless irritation with feel-goodism. Every so often he would sniff at the New Yorker, at the magazine’s slouching haute bourgeois casualness, the effortful effortlessness of the “caviar sophisticates.” The New Yorker, Warshow wrote in Commentary, “has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by pre- scribing the attitude to be adopted to it.” It was precisely his own efforts to come to grips with immediate experience that gave Warshow such a marvelous feeling for English prose and would make him a mentor to younger men. One of his writers, , would credit Warshow with having taught him one of the more invaluable lessons a writer can learn: “You had to force from your experience the last drop, sweet or bit- ter, it could possibly give.” Aspiring literary critic Norman Podhoretz thought of Warshow as everything he wanted to be. Warshow sat back-to-back in a cramped cubicle in the editorial offices with Nathan Glazer, a twenty-one-year-old just out of City College. Before Cohen drafted him to Commentary from the Contemporary Jewish Record,

20 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 21

Glazer had apprenticed to émigré social theorist Max Horkheimer, who was researching anti-Semitism in an office at the AJC just across the hall from the Contemporary Jewish Record.17 Glazer’s friend Irving Kristol joined in 1947, when he was twenty- seven, at the suggestion of his brother-in-law Milton Himmelfarb, another researcher at the AJC. Like Glazer, Kristol made $3,600 a year at Commen- tary. Besides enjoying the gifts of good-natured wit and kindly charm, Kris- tol seemed even then a born editor, a man of great deftness and patience.18 He was also more pragmatically minded. Kristol distinguished himself at the magazine, Glazer recalled, by his “interest in politics, real politics, elec- toral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, Communist influence in the intellectual world— no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an elec- tion.” Kristol was already married to Gertrude (Bea) Himmelfarb, to whom he had been introduced at a Trotskyist meeting in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. “We met courtesy of a dating service with the high-sounding name of the Young People’s Socialist League–Fourth International,” he liked to say. Despite atrocious typing skills, Midge Decter, twenty-three, was hired on Nathan Glazer’s recommendation in 1950 as an assistant to Robert Warshow. She left after about a year to have a baby with her first husband, Moshe Decter, and came back in 1953, this time as Elliot Cohen’s secre- tary.19 Three years and another daughter later, she married Norman Pod- horetz. Unlike her colleagues, she had spared herself the usual flirtation with Marxism. “The only grand posturing of my teens,” she later recalled, “had been a declared intention to die on the barricades in Palestine. . . . Being a Zionist had protected me from the kind of radical shenanigans that charac- terized virtually all of the in the prewar years.” Finally, Sherry Abel, a tall, bohemian, a motherly figure at the maga- zine, arrived as an editorial assistant in 1950 and right away leavened the office with her wit. Overhearing Cohen and Clem Greenberg locking horns one day, she peeked into the corner office and suggested that they ought to leave it to their shrinks to duel it out.

BY DESIGN, THERE WAS nothing slick about Elliot Cohen’s magazine; its austere, sober columns were not interrupted by illustrations.20 Yet by some mysterious alchemy, Cohen transfigured a freewheeling verbal tournament into type, with the result that his magazine’s pages, crackling with what

LONELINESS 21

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 22

Diana Trilling called “the life of significant contention,” took on a dis- tinct collective character. The Family’s acid-tongued, fast-talking contro- versialists, besotted with words, shared a taste for arguing brilliantly, for challenging conventions, for convincing others they were right. The Family’s old Marxism, after all, had tempted its adherents to think they had everything worked out. With a relish for verbal pugilism, they went at each other full tilt, trading salvos and fusillades, behaving in the heat of argument—as the old phrase had it—like Cossacks in a succah (the booth used in the Jewish festival of Succot). In relying on his carefully groomed stable of writers (almost all pieces were commissioned), Cohen managed somehow to capture the Family’s tempestuous gale of argument, its rough- and-tumble literary commotion. This conferred on the magazine’s pages a sureness of touch and a rhetorical dexterity. The style was learned, deft, discursive, commanding, self-assured. The best Commentary pieces depended for their effect on threading together a medley of bold formula- tions and unexpected juxtapositions. If Cohen’s writers specialized at all, they specialized in themselves. “The Jewish writer is forced to write, if he is serious, the way the pelican feeds its young,” Clem Greenberg said, “striking his own breast to draw the blood of his theme.” Daniel Bell, who started writing for Commentary in 1946 after he left his post as managing editor of the New Leader, once said that the intellectual, unlike the scholar, “begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.” And so no matter how serious the subject, the resulting free-swinging Commentary style departed as far as can be from the solemnities of academic stuffiness. (With rare excep- tion, the magazine declined to clutter its pages with footnotes.)21 Under Cohen’s steady hand, Commentary treated politics with a literary sensibil- ity. It balanced treatments of Jewish and general subjects, journalistic top- icality with large-bore analysis. Neither pretentious nor patronizing, it joined the rigorous with the personal, passion with intelligence, brainy heft with fluency. It clamored to go beyond the immediate subject to larger questions of culture. It brought religious intensity to secular expres- sion. It was writing con brio. A couple of other magazines—Partisan Review in New York and later Encounter in London—shared something of this quality (and many of the same writers), but only Commentary was self-consciously Jewish: a transposition of Jewish periodical culture into an Anglo milieu.

22 RUNNING COMMENTARY

From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher.

Top View